2026 Community of Human and Organizational Learning 32nd Annual Conference

An incident happened.
Miscommunication, misunderstanding, or other complex errors were involved.

How do you learn from it to prevent similar events in the future?

~ Simple techniques like the "Five Whys" often fix the blame, but don't fix the problem.
~ Root Cause Analyses (RCAs) are often too complex and expensive.
~ Learning Teams are popular, but have some unique drawbacks, too.

Join us in this half-day workshop to get a practical alternative:

Event Reviews.

Watch this quick 2-minute intro video.
https://vimeo.com/867774531?share=copy


Download a 4-page article on Event Reviews. It was published by the International Institute of Risk and Safety Management in London to over 8,000 companies in 90 nations.
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/8crz7p77qg1y8aao7oc9l/Final-Event-Review-article-by-Jake-Mazulewicz-in-IIRSM-Sentinel-April-2025.pdf?rlkey=d0hlcnaxa24c2ip0saiujof32&e=1&dl=0


Watch this fun, 15-second video to see 250+ people react to my Event Review presentation.  
https://vimeo.com/1029754069?share=copy

How do the safest and most reliable teams in the world build reliability, safety and trust at the same time? Can we practice classic AND modern approaches to safety & reliability together? How can we actually apply the best ideas from: Human & Organizational Performance (HOP), High Reliability Organizations (HROs), and Resilience Engineering?

In this interactive half-day workshop, you'll see how pilots, paratroopers, wildland firefighters, and other high-reliability teams across the globe have applied these seven practical steps, and how you can, too.

1) Take a Learning-Based Approach
2) Build Psychological Safety
3) Lead After Action Reviews (AARs)
4) Transform Investigations
5) Apply Defenses
6) Improve Systems
7) Build Resilience

Watch this quick, 90-second intro video.
https://vimeo.com/1028906615


Includes a copy of this 50-page, pocket-sized HOP Handbook for Leaders.
https://www.reliableorg.com/category/all-products


Also includes a chance to get a free, signed copy of my new book!
https://www.amazon.com/Seven-Practical-Steps-Reliability-Technical/dp/B0FP99Z41N

Repeat events can erode workforce culture and reduce innovation through the lack of understanding on why the event recurs.  This normalizes risk to the crew who are generally outcome focused rather than process focused.  Partnering with the crew and developing changes to the process WITH them is the key to produce effective change and reduce or prevent reoccurrence of unwanted events.  This presentation will discuss how we got here, and the effort required to improve our process to reduce and mitigate future risk.

When it comes to Human and Organizational Performance (HOP) and those initiatives and programs built around it, the problem is that there are many competing ideas, and most people think it’s got to be one or the other. 
This often leads to “new program” fatigue and disillusionment, which greatly undermines a Safety Professional’s influence. 
I intend to demonstrate how I have methodically built a thriving Human and Organizational (HOP) safety culture into one of the most difficult industries for such a thing, The Utility Line Clearance industry. 
I will lay out how I linked ten existing and newly created safety initiatives / pillars to beat the new program fatigue and disillusionment. 
We will discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each of the initiatives and how to reinforce the weakness and get maximum leverage from the strengths.
When it comes to the ideas of differing approaches, I say - if it works, it works.

By 2026, digital JSAs, operational digital twins, sentry cobots, AI copilots, and wearable technologies are no longer futuristic concepts — they are becoming part of everyday work. Yet these same technologies sit at a critical crossroads: they can be used to surveil people to ensure they do work compliantly, or to design systems so people can work safely.
The difference isn’t the technology. It’s intent.
This session takes participants through a “day in the life” of three roles in 2026 — a frontline worker, a manager, and an engineer — each interacting with advanced digital tools. For each role, two possible futures are explored. In one, technology becomes a compliance engine, amplifying oversight, reinforcing blame, and threatening professional identity and expertise. In the other, technology becomes a capacity-building partner, reshaping work design, revealing hidden constraints, and enabling resilient human performance.
Drawing on Human and Organizational Performance (HOP, the session explores a central tension of innovation: every innovation threatens someone’s expertise — and resistance is often a rational and predictable response. Participants will examine how intent, governance, and organizational learning practices determine whether technology becomes a digital tattletale or a cognitive aid.
This session explores the next frontier of HOP: designing digital systems that support how humans actually think, learn, and perform.

Human and Organizational Performance (HOP) principles have been in existence for decades, distilled from research, field experience, and lessons learned across various industries. These principles are deceptively simple—recognizing human fallibility, understanding that context drives behavior, and valuing learning as a core mechanism for improvement. Yet knowing the principles and living them are two very different challenges.

Part 1 of 2
Significant risks hide in our daily successes, but we don't have to wait for incidents to occur to learn -- we can learn every day through good habits, routines, and structured daily debriefs. Drawing on concepts from his 2026 book, Safety Science for Outdoor & Experiential Education, Steve Smith will provide an overview of HOP Principles and invite participants to practice debriefing through two different lenses - a traditional approach, and a HOP-informed approach. What are effective ways to use daily debriefs and guiding questions to understand the difference between work-as-imagined and work-as-done? This session will be 50% presentation, 50% hands-on-practice and applying the concepts from the presentation to actual, recent events and participant experiences, in the spirit of learning, not blaming.

Part 2

Significant risks hide in our daily successes, but we don't have to wait for incidents to occur to learn -- we can learn every day through good habits, routines, and structured daily debriefs. Drawing on concepts from his 2026 book, Safety Science for Outdoor & Experiential Education, Steve Smith will provide an overview of HOP Principles and invite participants to practice debriefing through two different lenses - a traditional approach, and a HOP-informed approach. What are effective ways to use daily debriefs and guiding questions to understand the difference between work-as-imagined and work-as-done? This session will be 50% presentation, 50% hands-on-practice and applying the concepts from the presentation to actual, recent events and participant experiences, in the spirt of learning, not blaming.